


How the west was won.

by orange_crushed



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-15
Updated: 2011-04-15
Packaged: 2017-10-18 03:03:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/184300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orange_crushed/pseuds/orange_crushed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As it turns out, he doesn't have any pockets, so Rose makes room for his hands in her own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How the west was won.

His truck has Pennsylvania plates on the front and Oregon on the back. He's filled the 3's into 8's with black paint. "And when I say person of interest," he says, cracking a careless smile like a chipped plate in her direction, "I just mean that I'm really very interesting."

"I'm sure." Rose sets down his burger and fries and leans against the counter, listening to the slow thwop-thwop-thwop of the ceiling fan. He digs into the lunch special with her standing right there over him. His arms are skinny; he keeps pushing up the sleeves of his shirt and they keep sliding right back down. He dips a cuff in the ketchup. "They have food where you're from, right ?"

"Mm," he says, not really agreeing or disagreeing. He digs under the hamburger bun and holds up the pickle for her benefit. "Pickles," he says. "They took them to sea, you know." She knows. She lets him go on, starved funny thing that he is. "In great big barrels. To prevent scurvy. Though you'd never want to see the inside of a pickle factory." He shudders. "That aside- delicious." He pops the slice into his mouth and chews for a minute, thoughtfully. "Have you ever been ?" he asks.

"To a pickle factory ?" Rose grins. "Or to sea ?"

"Ah." He smiles. There's mustard all over the corner of his mouth. "Either would do."

 

 

He's a failed medical student. He's a travelling salesman. He's the long-lost son of an oil baron. He's a worthless drifter. He's a disgraced financier or a very nice boy, depending on who she asks. "He rescued my cat off the Henderson's roof," says Maria. Rose's neighbor is seventy-eight years old and the ragged, sloth-eyed feline in her arms is probably seventy-nine. Maria smiles and rubs her nose on the cat's balding head. "He was very polite about it, even after the first time he fell out of the tree."

"Yes, but," Rose frowns. "Did he say where he was from ?"

"Around," says Maria.

He moves into the apartment above George's Garage, across the street from the diner, and Rose watches him sometimes through the plate-glass window. His truck is an antique but it runs perfectly, which is what got George's attention in the first place. Sometimes after the lunch rush Rose sees him downstairs in the lot with a rag tied around his head, elbow-deep in someone else's engine block, while George and Ray walk around shaking their heads. "He talks to the damn things. He's like, an idiot," Ray tells her, through a mouthful of the meatloaf supreme. "An idiot save-on."

"An idiot savant ?"

"Whatever."

At closing she sees the light on in the grimy upper-story window, sees him sitting beside it with coke-bottle glasses on and a heavy book balanced on his knees. She stands around and talks to Donna in the parking lot after the doors are locked, throws her apron into the backseat of her car. Sometimes when she looks up he's already looking back at her, his hand paused without touching the glass, waving hello and goodbye. She waves back. She never gets around to asking his name.

"Are you busy ?" he asks, one day, out of the blue, halfway through a cherry cobbler and a milkshake at ten in the morning. Rose looks down at her starched apron and sensible shoes and he coughs, embarassed. "I mean, later." His expression is hopeful. He waggles his eyebrows and Rose can't help but be caught in the sheer weird joy of it. For all she knows, he could be a grifter or a serial murderer or a stamp collector.

He tips well.

"Not busy at all," she says.

 

 

"This must be where you bring everybody," Rose says. They're standing on a cliff above the valley, the dry riverbed curling like an orange peel. When the sun is high enough the world will burst into red and orange like a flower, like a rose, so she's always been told by drunk ranchers on the midnight shift. But right now the early world is blue and pink, white and gold, pale as sand, cold as spring. Rose shivers into her duffel coat and waits for him to speak.

"No," he says. When she back at him, he's staring at her with those odd deep eyes. The centers are dark like agates, stirred together with something bright and sad. They're really very pretty. "This isn't where I bring everybody."

They listen for the birds calling, high above the rocks, watch them wheeling and dipping in front of the clouds. It's cold to stand so high. As it turns out, he doesn't have any pockets, so Rose makes room for his hands in her own.

"Let's go back." Rose murmurs. "I'll cut you a slice of pie. It's Wednesday. Blueberry."

"Fantastic," he says.

 

 

Things just _happen_ around him.

"Okay." He shakes his pant leg out one last time. "The giant ants were not part of my genius plan for fun."

They're standing on top of a picnic table at the state park, holding their plastic-wrapped sandwiches and Rose's cheap stereo away from the insects that swarmed over the potato salad and pretty much any exposed skin. "I think they're winning. A well-deserved victory," he adds, trying not to step in a swarm. "Want to beat a noble retreat ?" He holds out his hand. Rose laughs and takes it without thinking. "Run!" They leap off the bench together and go hurtling over the grass, jumping the ditch at the edge of the gravel lot. Lunch is a hasty affair in the back of the truck and then a long stop at the Cone King. He orders everything covered in sprinkles.

Rose takes him to her mother's house and Jackie makes her famous take-out. They sit in front of the television after dinner with his feet in Rose's lap and Jackie giving her daughter knowing looks over the back of the couch.

"He's skinny," she says, wisely. "Your father was skinny like that. Makes a woman want to feed him up."

"M- _om_ ," says Rose.

 

 

They spend the fall and then the winter together, hands over the heater in his truck, chopping down their own Christmas tree from the lot outside town, stringing up lights on her mom's porch and in the dirty windows of his garage apartment. The place smells like oil and grease even after he scrubs the life out of it and puts plants all over the kitchen windows. "Living things," he says. "I like living things." For Christmas she gives him a book about indoor gardening and another one about the first men on the moon. He gives her a necklace with a single flawless pearl on it, and claims he dug it out of the clam shell himself. "In the South Sea," he tells her. "The water was like bathwater at that time of year. We should go back. You'll need earrings to go with it." He keeps saying things like that, more and more, taping maps to the fridge, watching nature documentaries about Alaska and the Galapogos on the public station late into the night.

"Who are you, really ?" she asks.

"I'm me, Rose."

They sit curled under an afghan in the dark and look out at the lights and the pitch sky beyond the glass. A thin, light snow is falling for the first time in a year. It falls like down or like powdered sugar, dusting the car windshields and the gas pump and the chrome trim of the diner across the road. Rose loves the snow, though it never stays. "I've been thinking," he says.

"Hm ?"

"It's better with two, isn't it ?" His hand is warm on top of her knee. The afghan itches. "I don't really know how to live with anyone else. I'm out of practice. But I could learn for you. If you want me to." She says she does. He takes a victory lap of the apartment and pulls her onto the torn-off wrapping paper beneath their anemic tree. They make out under the glistening eyes of silver plastic snowmen and glass angels, and he says he has one more gift to give her. It turns out not to be a terrible double entendre.

His other present is a key.

"Take me with you when you go," she says. And he promises he will.


End file.
